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If the Bains had striven for years, they could have been no more successful in making their living-room into a small but admirably complete museum of objects suggesting strain, discomfort, or the tomb. Yet they had never even tried for the effect. Some of the articles that the room contained were wedding-presents; some had been put in from time to time as substitutes as their predecessors succumbed to age and wear; a few had been brought along by the Old Gentleman when he had come to make his home with the Bains some five years before.

It was curious how perfectly they all fitted into the general scheme. It was as if they had all been selected by a single enthusiast to whom time was but little object, so long as he could achieve the eventual result of transforming the Bain living-room into a home chamber of horrors, modified a bit for family use.

It was a high-ceilinged room, with heavy, dark old woodwork, that brought long and unavoidable thoughts of silver handles and weaving worms. The paper was the color of stale mustard. Its design, once a dashing affair of a darker tone splashed with twinkling gold, had faded into lines and smears that resolved themselves, before the eyes of the sensitive, into hordes of battered heads and tortured profiles, some eyeless, some with clotted gashes for mouths.

The furniture was dark and cumbersome and subject to painful creakings—sudden, sharp creaks that seemed to be wrung from its brave silence only when it could bear no more. A close, earthy smell came from its dulled tapestry cushions, and try as Mrs. Bain might, furry gray dust accumulated in the crevices.

The center-table was upheld by the perpetually strained arms of three carved figures, insistently female to the waist, then trailing discreetly off into a confusion of scrolls and scales. Upon it rested a row of blameless books, kept in place at the ends by the straining shoulder-muscles of two bronze-colored plaster elephants, forever pushing at their tedious toil.

On the heavily carved mantel was a gaily colored figure of a curly-headed peasant boy, ingeniously made so that he sat on the shelf and dangled one leg over. He was in the eternal act of removing a thorn from his chubby foot, his round face realistically wrinkled with the cruel pain. Just above him hung a steel-engraving of a chariot-race, the dust flying, the chariots careening wildly, the drivers ferociously lashing their maddened horses, the horses themselves caught by the artist the moment before their hearts burst, and they dropped in their traces.

The opposite wall was devoted to the religious in art; a steel-engraving of the Crucifixion, lavish of ghastly detail; a sepia-print of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the cords cutting deep into the arms writhing from the stake, arrows bristling in the thick, soft-looking body; a water-color copy of a “Mother of Sorrows,” the agonized eyes raised to a cold heaven, great, bitter tears forever on the wan cheeks, paler for the grave-like draperies that wrapped the head.

Beneath the windows hung a painting in oil of two lost sheep, huddled hopelessly together in the midst of a wild blizzard. This was one of the Old Gentleman’s contributions to the room. Mrs. Bain was wont to observe of it that the frame was worth she didn’t know how much.

The wall-space beside the door was reserved for a bit of modern art that had once caught Mr. Bain’s eye in a stationer’s window—a colored print, showing a railroad-crossing, with a train flying relentlessly toward it, and a low, red automobile trying to dash across the track before the iron terror shattered it into eternity. Nervous visitors who were given chairs facing this scene usually made opportunity to change their seats before they could give their whole minds to the conversation.

The ornaments, placed with careful casualness on the table and the upright piano, included a small gilt lion of Lucerne, a little, chipped, plaster Laocoön, and a savage china kitten eternally about to pounce upon a plump and helpless china mouse. This last had been one of the Old Gentleman’s own wedding-gifts. Mrs. Bain explained, in tones low with awe, that it was very old.

The ash-receivers, of Oriental manufacture, were in the form of grotesque heads, tufted with bits of gray human hair, and given bulging, dead, glassy eyes and mouths stretched into great gapes, into which those who had the heart for it might flick their ashes. Thus the smallest details of the room kept loyally to the spirit of the thing, and carried on the effect.

But the three people now sitting in the Bains’ living-room were not in the least oppressed by the decorative scheme. Two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Bain, not only had had twenty-eight years of the room to accustom themselves to it, but had been stanch admirers of it from the first. And no surroundings, however morbid, could close in on the aristocratic calm of Mrs. Bain’s sister, Mrs. Whittaker.

She graciously patronized the very chair she now sat in, smiled kindly on the glass of cider she held in her hand. The Bains were poor, and Mrs. Whittaker had, as it is ingenuously called, married well, and none of them ever lost sight of these facts.

But Mrs. Whittaker’s attitude of kindly tolerance was not confined to her less fortunate relatives. It extended to friends of her youth, working people, the arts, politics, the United States in general, and God, Who had always supplied her with the best of service. She could have given Him an excellent reference at any time.

The three people sat with a comfortable look of spending the evening. There was an air of expectancy about them, a not unpleasant little nervousness, as of those who wait for a curtain to rise. Mrs. Bain had brought in cider in the best tumblers, and had served some of her nut cookies in the plate painted by hand with clusters of cherries—the plate she had used for sandwiches when, several years ago, her card club had met at her house.

She had thought it over a little tonight, before she lifted out the cherry plate, then quickly decided and resolutely heaped it with cookies. After all, it was an occasion—informal, perhaps, but still an occasion. The Old Gentleman was dying upstairs. At five o’clock that afternoon the doctor had said that it would be a surprise to him if the Old Gentleman lasted till the middle of the night—a big surprise, he had augmented.

There was no need for them to gather at the Old Gentleman’s bedside. He would not have known any of them. In fact, he had not known them for almost a year, addressing them by wrong names and asking them grave, courteous questions about the health of husbands or wives or children who belonged to other branches of the family. And he was quite unconscious now.

Miss Chester, the nurse who had been with him since “this last stroke,” as Mrs. Bain importantly called it, was entirely competent to attend and watch him. She had promised to call them if, in her tactful words, she saw any signs.

So the Old Gentleman’s daughters and son-in-law waited in the warm living-room, and sipped their cider, and conversed in low, polite tones.

Mrs. Bain cried a little in pauses in the conversation. She had always cried easily and often. Yet, in spite of her years of practice, she did not do it well. Her eyelids grew pink and sticky, and her nose gave her no little trouble, necessitating almost constant sniffling. She sniffled loudly and conscientiously, and frequently removed her pince-nez to wipe her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, gray with damp.

Mrs. Whittaker, too, bore a handkerchief, but she appeared to be holding it in waiting. She was dressed, in compliment to the occasion, in her black crepe de Chine, and she had left her lapis-lazuli pin, her olivine bracelet, and her topaz and amethyst rings at home in her bureau drawer, retaining only her lorgnette on its gold chain, in case there should be any reading to be done.

Mrs. Whittaker’s dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy. She was an authority on where to place monograms on linen, how to instruct working folk, and what to say in letters of condolence. The word “lady” figured largely in her conversation. Blood, she often predicted, would tell.

Mrs. Bain wore a rumpled white shirt-waist and the old blue skirt she saved for “around the kitchen.” There had been time to change, after she had telephoned the doctor’s verdict to her sister, but she had not been quite sure whether it was the thing to do. She had thought that Mrs. Whittaker might expect her to display a little distraught untidiness at a time like this; might even go in for it in a mild way herself.

Now Mrs. Bain looked at her sister’s elaborately curled, painstakingly brown coiffure, and nervously patted her own straggling hair, gray at the front, with strands of almost lime-color in the little twist at the back. Her eyelids grew wet and sticky again, and she hung her glasses over one forefinger while she applied the damp handkerchief. After all, she reminded herself and the others, it was her poor father.

Oh, but it was really the best thing, Mrs. Whittaker explained in her gentle, patient voice.

“You wouldn’t want to see father go on like this,” she pointed out. Mr. Bain echoed her, as if struck with the idea. Mrs. Bain had nothing to reply to them. No, she wouldn’t want to see the Old Gentleman go on like this.

Five years before, Mrs. Whittaker had decided that the Old Gentleman was getting too old to live alone with only old Annie to cook for him and look after him. It was only a question of a little time before it “wouldn’t have looked right,” his living alone, when he had his children to take care of him. Mrs. Whittaker always stopped things before they got to the stage where they didn’t look right. So he had come to live with the Bains.

Some of his furniture had been sold; a few things, such as his silver, his tall clock, and the Persian rug he had bought at the Exposition, Mrs. Whittaker had found room for in her own house; and some he brought with him to the Bains’.

Mrs. Whittaker’s house was much larger than her sister’s, and she had three servants and no children. But, as she told her friends, she had held back and let Allie and Lewis have the Old Gentleman.

“You see,” she explained, dropping her voice to the tones reserved for not very pretty subjects, “Allie and Lewis are—well, they haven’t a great deal.”

So it was gathered that the Old Gentleman would do big things for the Bains when he came to live with them. Not exactly by paying board—it is a little too much to ask your father to pay for his food and lodging, as if he were a stranger. But, as Mrs. Whittaker suggested, he could do a great deal in the way of buying needed things for the house and keeping everything going.

And the Old Gentleman did contribute to the Bain household. He bought an electric heater and an electric fan, new curtains, storm-windows, and light-fixtures, all for his bedroom; and had a nice little bathroom for his personal use made out of the small guest-room adjoining it.

He shopped for days until he found a coffee-cup large enough for his taste; he bought several large ash-trays, and a dozen extra-size bath-towels, that Mrs. Bain marked with his initials. And every Christmas and birthday he gave Mrs. Bain a round, new, shining ten-dollar gold piece. Of course, he presented gold pieces to Mrs. Whittaker, too, on like appropriate occasions. The Old Gentleman prided himself always on his fair-mindedness. He often said that he was not one to show any favoritism.

Mrs. Whittaker was Cordelia-like to her father during his declining years. She came to see him several times a month, bringing him jelly or potted hyacinths. Sometimes she sent her car and chauffeur for him, so that he might take an easy drive through the town, and Mrs. Bain might be afforded a chance to drop her cooking and accompany him. When Mrs. Whittaker was away on trips with her husband, she almost never neglected to send her father picture post-cards of various points of interest.

The Old Gentleman appreciated her affection, and took pride in her. He enjoyed being told that she was like him.

“That Hattie,” he used to tell Mrs. Bain, “she’s a fine woman—a fine woman.”

As soon as she had heard that the Old Gentleman was dying Mrs. Whittaker had come right over, stopping only to change her dress and have her dinner. Her husband was away in the woods with some men, fishing. She explained to the Bains that there was no use in disturbing him—it would have been impossible for him to get back that night. As soon as—well, if anything happened she would telegraph him, and he could return in time for the funeral.

Mrs. Bain was sorry that he was away. She liked her ruddy, jovial, loud-voiced brother-in-law.

“It’s too bad that Clint couldn’t be here,” she said, as she had said several times before. “He’s so fond of cider,” she added.

“Father,” said Mrs. Whittaker, “was always very fond of Clint.” Already the Old Gentleman had slipped into the past tense.

“Everybody likes Clint,” Mr. Bain stated.

He was included in the “everybody.” The last time he had failed in business, Clint had given him the clerical position he had since held over at the brush works. It was pretty generally understood that this had been brought about through Mrs. Whittaker’s intervention, but still they were Clint’s brush works, and it was Clint who paid him his salary. And forty dollars a week is indubitably forty dollars a week.

“I hope he’ll be sure and be here in time for the funeral,” said Mrs. Bain. “It will be Wednesday morning, I suppose, Hat?”

Mrs. Whittaker nodded.

“Or perhaps around two o’clock Wednesday afternoon,” she amended. “I always think that’s a nice time. Father has his frock coat, Allie?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Bain said eagerly. “And it’s all clean and lovely. He has everything. Hattie, I noticed the other day at Mr. Newton’s funeral they had more of a blue necktie on him, so I suppose they’re wearing them—Mollie Newton always has everything just so. But I don’t know——”

“I think,” said Mrs. Whittaker firmly, “that there is nothing lovelier than black for an old gentleman.”

“Poor Old Gentleman,” said Mr. Bain, shaking his head. “He would have been eighty-five if he just could have lived till next September. Well, I suppose it’s all for the best.”

He took a small draft of cider and another cooky.

“A wonderful, wonderful life,” summarized Mrs. Whittaker. “And a wonderful, wonderful old gentleman.”

“Well, I should say so,” said Mrs. Bain. “Why, up to the last year he was as interested in everything! It was, ‘Allie, how much do you have to give for your eggs now?’ and ‘Allie, why don’t you change your butcher?—this one’s robbing you,’ and ‘Allie, who was that you were talking to on the telephone?’ all day long! Everybody used to speak of it.”

“And he used to come to the table right up to this stroke,” Mr. Bain related, chuckling reminiscently. “My, he used to raise Cain when Allie didn’t cut up his meat fast enough to suit him. Always had a temper, I’ll tell you, the Old Gentleman did. Wouldn’t stand for us having anybody in to meals—he didn’t like that worth a cent. Eighty-four years old, and sitting right up there at the table with us!”

They vied in telling instances of the Old Gentleman’s intelligence and liveliness, as parents cap one another’s anecdotes of precocious children.

“It’s only the past year that he had to be helped up- and down-stairs,” said Mrs. Bain. “Walked up-stairs all by himself, and more than eighty years old!”

Mrs. Whittaker was amused.

“I remember you said that once when Clint was here,” she remarked, “and Clint said, ‘Well, if you can’t walk up-stairs by the time you’re eighty, when are you going to learn?’ ”

Mrs. Bain smiled politely, because her brother-in-law had said it. Otherwise she would have been shocked and wounded.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Bain. “Wonderful.”

“The only thing I could have wished,” Mrs. Bain said, after a pause—“I could have wished he’d been a little different about Paul. Somehow I’ve never felt quite right since Paul went into the navy.”

Mrs. Whittaker’s voice fell into the key used for the subject that has been gone over and over and over again.

“Now, Allie,” she said, “you know yourself that was the best thing that could have happened. Father told you that himself, often and often. Paul was young, and he wanted to have all his young friends running in and out of the house, banging doors and making all sorts of racket, and it would have been a terrible nuisance for father. You must realize that father was more than eighty years old, Allie.”

“Yes, I know,” Mrs. Bain said. Her eyes went to the photograph of her son in his seaman’s uniform, and she sighed.

“And besides,” Mrs. Whittaker pointed out triumphantly, “now that Miss Chester’s here in Paul’s room, there wouldn’t have been any room for him. So you see!”

There was rather a long pause. Then Mrs. Bain edged toward the other thing that had been weighing upon her.

“Hattie,” she said, “I suppose—I suppose we’d ought to let Matt know?”

“I shouldn’t,” said Mrs. Whittaker composedly. She always took great pains with her “shall’s” and “will’s.” “I only hope that he doesn’t see it in the papers in time to come on for the funeral. If you want to have your brother turn up drunk at the services, Allie, I don’t.”

“But I thought he’d straightened up,” said Mr. Bain. “Thought he was all right since he got married.”

“Yes, I know, I know, Lewis,” Mrs. Whittaker said wearily. “I’ve heard all about that. All I say is, I know what Matt is.”

“John Loomis was telling me,” reported Mr. Bain, “he was going through Akron, and he stopped off to see Matt. Said they had a nice little place, and he seemed to be getting along fine. Said she seemed like a cracker-jack housekeeper.”

Mrs. Whittaker smiled.

“Yes,” she said, “John Loomis and Matt were always two of a kind—you couldn’t believe a word either of them said. Probably she did seem to be a good housekeeper. I’ve no doubt she acted the part very well. Matt never made any bones of the fact that she was on the stage once, for almost a year. Excuse me from having that woman come to father’s funeral. If you want to know what I think, I think that Matt marrying a woman like that had a good deal to do with hastening father’s death.”

The Bains sat in awe.

“And after all father did for Matt, too,” added Mrs. Whittaker, her voice shaken.

“Well, I should think so,” Mr. Bain was glad to agree. “I remember how the Old Gentleman used to try and help Matt get along. He’d go down, like it was to Mr. Fuller, that time Matt was working at the bank, and he’d explain to him, ‘Now, Mr. Fuller,’ he’d say, ‘I don’t know whether you know it, but this son of mine has always been what you might call the black sheep of the family. He’s been kind of a drinker,’ he’d say, ‘and he’s got himself into trouble a couple of times, and if you’d just keep an eye on him, so’s to see he keeps straight, it’d be a favor to me.’

“Mr. Fuller told me about it himself. Said it was wonderful the way the Old Gentleman came right out and talked just as frankly to him. Said he’d never had any idea Matt was that way—wanted to hear all about it.”

Mrs. Whittaker nodded sadly.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “Time and again father would do that. And then, as like as not, Matt would get one of his sulky fits, and not turn up at his work.”

“And when Matt would be out of work,” Mrs. Bain said, “the way father’d hand him out his car-fare, and I don’t know what all! When Matt was a grown man, going on thirty years old, father would take him down to Newins & Malley’s and buy him a whole new outfit—pick out everything himself. He always used to say Matt was the kind that would get cheated out of his eye-teeth if he went into a store alone.”

“My, father hated to see anybody make a fool of themselves about money,” Mrs. Whittaker commented. “Remember how he always used to say, ‘Anybody can make money, but it takes a wise man to keep it’?”

“I suppose he must be a pretty rich man,” Mr. Bain said, abruptly restoring the Old Gentleman to the present.

“Oh—rich!” Mrs. Whittaker’s smile was at its kindliest. “But he managed his affairs very well, father did, right up to the last. Everything is in splendid shape, Clint says.”

“He showed you the will, didn’t he, Hat?” asked Mrs. Bain, forming bits of her sleeve into little plaits between her thin, hard fingers.

“Yes,” said her sister. “Yes, he did. He showed me the will. A little over a year ago, I think it was, wasn’t it? You know, just before he started to fail, that time.”

She took a small bite of cooky.

“Awfully good,” she said. She broke into a little bubbly laugh, the laugh she used at teas and wedding receptions and fairly formal dinners. “You know,” she went on, as one sharing a good story, “he’s gone and left all that old money to me. ‘Why, Father!’ I said, as soon as I’d read that part. But it seems he’d gotten some sort of idea in his head that Clint and I would be able to take care of it better than anybody else, and you know what father was, once he made up that mind of his. You can just imagine how I felt. I couldn’t say a thing.”

She laughed again, shaking her head in amused bewilderment.

“Oh, and Allie,” she said, “he’s left you all the furniture he brought here with him, and all the things he bought since he came. And Lewis is to have his set of Thackeray. And that money he lent Lewis, to try and tide him over in the hardware business that time—that’s to be regarded as a gift.”

She sat back and looked at them, smiling.

“Lewis paid back most all of that money father lent him that time,” Mrs. Bain said. “There was only about two hundred dollars more, and then he would have had it all paid up.”

“That’s to be regarded as a gift,” insisted Mrs. Whittaker. She leaned over and patted her brother-in-law’s arm. “Father always liked you, Lewis,” she said softly.

“Poor Old Gentleman,” murmured Mr. Bain.

“Did it—did it say anything about Matt?” asked Mrs. Bain.

“Oh, Allie!” Mrs. Whittaker gently reproved her. “When you think of all the money father spent and spent on Matt, it seems to me he did more than enough—more than enough. And then when Matt went way off there to live, and married that woman, and never a word about it—father hearing it all through strangers—well, I don’t think any of us realize how it hurt father. He never said much about it, but I don’t think he ever got over it. I’m always so thankful that poor dear mother didn’t live to see how Matt turned out.”

“Poor mother,” said Mrs. Bain shakily, and brought the grayish handkerchief into action once more. “I can hear her now, just as plain. ‘Now, children,’ she used to say, ‘do for goodness’ sake let’s all try and keep your father in a good humor.’ If I’ve heard her say it once, I’ve heard her say it a hundred times. Remember, Hat?”

“Do I remember!” said Mrs. Whittaker. “And do you remember how they used to play whist, and how furious father used to get when he lost?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Bain cried excitedly, “and how mother used to have to cheat, so as to be sure and not win from him? She got so she used to be able to do it just as well!”

They laughed softly, filled with memories of the gone days. A pleasant, thoughtful silence fell around them.

Mrs. Bain patted a yawn to extinction, and looked at the clock.

“Ten minutes to eleven,” she said. “Goodness, I had no idea it was anywhere near so late. I wish—” She stopped just in time, crimson at what her wish would have been.

“You see, Lew and I have got in the way of going to bed early,” she explained. “Father slept so light, we couldn’t have people in like we used to before he came here, to play a little bridge or anything, on account of disturbing him. And if we wanted to go to the movies or anywhere, he’d go on so about being left alone that we just kind of gave up going.”

“Oh, the Old Gentleman always let you know what he wanted,” said Mr. Bain, smiling. “He was a wonder, I’ll tell you. Nearly eighty-five years old!”

“Think of it,” said Mrs. Whittaker.

A door clicked open above them, and feet ran quickly and not lightly down the stairs. Miss Chester burst into the room.

“Oh, Mrs. Bain!” she cried. “Oh, the Old Gentleman! Oh, he’s gone! I noticed him kind of stirring and whimpering a little, and he seemed to be trying to make motions at his warm milk, like as if he wanted some. So I put the cup up to his mouth, and he sort of fell over, and just like that he was gone, and the milk all over him.”

Mrs. Bain instantly collapsed into passionate weeping. Her husband put his arm tenderly about her, and murmured a series of “Now-now’s.”

Mrs. Whittaker rose, set her cider-glass carefully on the table, shook out her handkerchief, and moved toward the door.

“A lovely death,” she pronounced. “A wonderful, wonderful life, and now a beautiful, peaceful death. Oh, it’s the best thing, Allie; it’s the best thing.”

“Oh, it is, Mrs. Bain; it’s the best thing,” Miss Chester said earnestly. “It’s really a blessing. That’s what it is.”

Among them they got Mrs. Bain up the stairs.